ART-PRESENTATION: The Pineapple Show

Boys’ Quarters Project Space is a Contemporary Art Gallery that opened on 31/5/14 in downtown Port Harcourt, Nigeria. The Gallery presents works by local Niger Delta artists as well as national and international artists. The gallery is situated in the old offices of the late writer, activist and Nobel-Nominee, Ken Saro-Wiwa, in Port Harcourt, the capital of the country’s oil industry.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Tiwani Contemporary Archive

The group exhibition “The Pineapple Show” is a collaboration of Boys’ Quarters Project Space and Tiwani Contemporary-London. For this exhibition, the curator has drawn together a group of artists working out of Nigeria, the UK and the United States, who have produced artworks that explore the semiotics of the iconic pineapple fruit and expand its cultural narratives. The pineapple has long served to represent identity, status and expression across diverse and international cultures. The exhibition aims to add to the Western European canon of visual representations of and literature on the fruit, which has often privileged an imperialist vision of the pineapple as a symbol of power, wealth and exoticism. The exhibition mines, exposes and invents new narratives around the fruit. The works of: Elizabeth Colomba, Ian Deleón, Ayana Evans, Jowhor Ile, Odili Donald Odita, Perrin Oglafa, Temitayo Ogunbiyi, Zina Saro-Wiwa, Johnson Uwadinma and Arlene Wandera, explore the fruit’s many histories as well as its cultural, emotional and psychic resonances, taking on issues of labour and luxury, power and powerlessness, vulnerability and violence, language, gender, memory and otherness: all issues that have emerged from meditations on this fruit and are expressed through the bodies and practices of the artists involved. Through a diverse range of media encompassing painting, drawing, sculpture, video, sound, photography, performance and fiction, these artists variously consider the pineapple as a symbol of romantic love in Nigeria; an inspiration for African hairstyles; the dialogue between the black female body and the labour involved in pineapple production; and as an emotional lodestar, a cosmic entity, a portal.

Info: Curator: Zina Saro-Wiwa, Boys’ Quarters Project Space, 24 Aggrey Road, Port Harcourt, Duration: 9/7-13/8/16, http://boysquartersprojectspace.com